Camouflage Room
by floraposte
Summary: "The old pattern had returned, an unannounced visitor, creeping back into her bones and gripping her heart, demanding caution in the dark." Some nights, Mary still believes Matthew is missing, although he sleeps by her side. Set post-S2, Mary and Matthew are married.


Thank you to Sam (_Cyrillah_, here and on Tumblr) and Sam (_foooolintherain_ on Tumblr) for their thoughtful encouragement and insightful suggestions.

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_I hid in my ordinary days, in the long grass of routine,_

_in my camouflage rooms. You sprawled in my gaze,_

_staring back from anyone's face, from the shape of a cloud,_

_from the pining, earth-struck moon_

—Carol Ann Duffy, from "You"

The old pattern had returned, an unannounced visitor, creeping back into her bones and gripping her heart, demanding caution in the dark. Mary was five or six when she first heard the servants whispering about the aristocratic spirits that roamed the halls of the Abbey. She found afterwards that nights became unbearably frightening, and she sat up, pulse racing, and imagined the specters of villains from the fairy tales she read, gnarled witches and twitchy madmen and wild-eyed goblins, emerging from the walls. Clinging to her pillow, she waited until the sky began to brighten, gray to rose then yellow, before she could fall asleep, and she spent her lessons and meals the next weeks exhausted. Her parents summoned a doctor to the house to speak to her about how we humans all become afraid sometimes, and to remind her that she was perfectly safe; she fidgeted through the meeting, wanting to tell him about the ghastly visions, but the haunted look in his tired eyes behind their round spectacles stopped her. After a few months, whether from fatigue or forgetfulness, she slept through the night again.

She felt so close to that girl now, her body begging to sleep while her mind conjured fear. The return of this unease was a stolen peace, as though she'd skipped a pebble perfectly far out and away across a shimmering pond, only to look down and find the rock still poised in her hand. The curtains billowed, sending patterns of pale light across the floor. Like a shifting map of winds and time, the shadows rippled and flickered. A faint breeze traced her bare shoulders, and she breathed in the dawn air, scented by the hyacinths that signaled spring. The signs of daybreak soothed her, but she wouldn't rest until he awoke, until his eyes opened upon hers, until his sunrise revealed vivid reality to her. She felt the pressured echoes of his unfading dark bruise, the lingering ghosts that snuck up and down her spine with the memories that no amount of fatigue could erase, and that could never be forgotten.

She fell asleep beside Matthew now. Their legs and hands intertwined, they'd talk and laugh and read to one another in the hush of the night before their eyes grew heavy. With their conversation lingering in her ears, and their bodies curled together, she drifted off easily. Not until later did she awaken, gasping for breath, hardly believing in his presence next to her. Then she lay awake in the dimness of the lightening sky, waiting for him to pull her warmly into his arms, to kiss the circles under her eyes, to remind her that the shadowy recollections that seemed to cling to life were now only part of a long-slumbering past.

She replayed the last cozy night before this restless morning, wrapped in the cocoon they created beneath the scarlet covers and behind the écru drapery, where they felt rebellious and wanton, hidden from the watching world. They'd snuck up polished glasses and a bottle of rich red wine. He asked her for a funny story from her life at Downton before he knew her. They often posed these types of questions, quilting their lives apart together. She told Matthew about the cup of piping hot tea she'd accidentally spilled on an onerous houseguest, who toppled over into Violet at the shock; the man never reappeared at the house again. She remembered Violet's exclamation about the crudity of losing one's balance in another's home, and he chuckled so brightly, she wanted to leave her heart right there, floating in the tranquil lamplit glow of their embrace.

In keeping with their habit, it became his turn to share a tale, and he told her about the notes, sarcastic commentary and grammatical corrections, he'd written in his legal texts—notes that were discovered when he knocked a book to the floor, and the professor proceeded to pick up the volume, and deliver Matthew's remarks aloud. He blushed remembering the discovery, and Mary could imagine the younger man she hadn't known. She nestled closer to him, running her hand along his arm, while his fingers brushed through her hair, as they studied the fabric of one another, and knitted the pieces into place.

He teased her then about being a schemer who spilled that tea on purpose, and she nudged her leg against his, saying at least she wasn't a pompous vandal, and he tickled her sides, until they were both breathless, and she rolled over him to reach for their book, arguing that they both ought to educate themselves in Victorian manners. Mary Garth was waiting for Fred Vincy to be more practical, to make a life for himself. They took turns with the voices, adding dramatic flourishes whenever possible, sometimes leaping up to enact a particularly impassioned speech. The cadence of his narration eventually soothed her to drowsiness, and the sure press of his body against her anchored her to sleep.

The awakening was always the same, the rush of molten waves spiking her nerves and rolling through her veins. Heavy and overheated, fear clamored on the shore of her conscious, her mind and body struggling with one another for an exit from the panicked symphony within. She saw him, and scanned his nose and eyelashes and lips with her frantic eyes, and reached to touch him, carefully gliding her fingertips along his smooth cheek and bristly jaw and down his strong side, expanding and contracting with each breath, but she didn't believe in him. The villain was a calendar, days and months and years without him whipping by, the vermillion-inked pages fluttering into a flaming fireplace, sparking blue, the smoke rising and clogging her throat. There were the billows of smog that surrounded him, engulfing him in war and delirium and regret, and the smudges of dirt and ash and blood she couldn't help him to escape, and the shady bench and walls of ancient books and phantom seat at the dinner table that represented him in his absence, but these were all such empty spaces; they were specters that didn't dance or laugh or smile, and that could never live on to hold her through the night.

They'd fallen so easily into their new intimacy, she was almost alarmed. She felt they'd always been together this way, yet marveled at the fresh intensity of their connection. They filled lost time languorously, as though each one the old commanding clocks stopped for them; they were too wrapped up in one another to hear the ticks and chimes. She yearned to know all of him, but there were phases that eluded her. She saw so many doorways through which he could have disappeared, choked by tangled weeds of distance, never again to find the entryway to her, leaving her to wonder always about what could have been between them. She knew now. She knew, and how could she be sure that every gate they passed through wasn't a trap, every sign wasn't misdirection, and every wind wasn't a tunnel prepared to pull him away as before? She knew the visible scars that marked his body's path back to her, but they were also signs of the visceral sores that would never heal.

He slept soundly most nights. Sometimes he awoke shuddering, and clung to her, tangling his limbs with hers, tugging her close to his chest, bending his tear-stained face into her neck, where he felt her pulse, and he calmed. She could do that for him. She felt unworthy of such a task, and yet she filled the role naturally, whispering words of love into his ear, rubbing her hand gently up and down his tender back, and nuzzling against him. So when he slept, she could never bring herself to wake him, to disturb whatever peace he could gather. She knew that he would always turn to comfort her, but she didn't know how to explain the confusion that gripped her in the gloom. She did not know how to tell him that even though he was so near, she felt sure at times that he was gone.

She'd begun reading early in her childhood, and she devoured the new worlds, hid inside the tangled chapters—fanciful and florid, satirical and shrewd, whimsical and wise—to visit and explore whenever she liked. Yet the novels never mentioned what happened after requited romance. They ended in marriage or despair, never minding the raw, exposed surface of love, the aching thrill, the burning dread of it. As though the authors kept their discoveries secret, or the words, so plentiful and imaginative at the start, eluded the writers once passion made its way to some kind of lasting state. She imagined that Matthew would become philosophical, tell her that they created their own ever-after, that there were no written guides, only their clumsy souls that would do all they could. But her feelings overfilled the brim, bright ruby, spilling and saturating to the core of her, to the marrow of what she could not comprehend, which was how to bear this overwhelming emotion with the stark awareness of loss lurking in the dark, dusty corners of their history.

Plato's wandering soul mates, the red thread of fate—she knew these concepts, but never imagined her life as a mystical search for an intertwining partner. She was nothing if not an independent force, as much as she could be, below the gilt chandeliers, ensconced between the brocade walls, and paraded before the multiplying mirrors. Perhaps both states of self were true at once; she met him each day at the point of truth, not a glimmering reflection, but an unvarnished ally in a shared search for soothing the wounds of their unwanted hours in peril and apart.

Now she felt drawn to the window, to watch the lemony pink of the sun break through, to latch onto the dance of the white flowering trees, and to quiet her thoughts in nature's rhythms. She looked over at him, sleeping as he usually did, on his back, one arm extended so the knuckles of his hand rested softly against her hip. He breathed slowly and steadily. She watched the fine red mark that ran down his right side, the rise and fall of the healed wound. She brushed her hand along the puckered line of skin there, and then turned to the casement, feeling the air from outside ripple through the light fabric of her nightgown. The sorrowful song of a mourning dove spun its slow, wavering thread again and again into the open window. As she moved toward the sound, the bed shifted beside her, and he grabbed her hand to his chest. She swept around to him, latching onto those bright eyes that called her from the cacophonous sea that wrestled and wailed inside, that nightly stole him from her. She absorbed his presence, his body molding to hers, his lips at her temple; she soaked it all into her skin, drawing him around her, a planet recapturing its everlasting orbit, a golden moon swooning on the edge of a new day.

What Mary didn't know—what they hadn't yet shared—was that, as he did every night, and every morning when he found her nervous and jittery at the break of dawn, he held her, and watched her find the reprieve of sleep, before he found his own.


End file.
